[...] Oona wanted to be an actress. The sad fact of this city: the thousands of actresses with their thousands of efficiency apartments and teeth-whitening strips, the energy generated by thousands of treadmill hours and breach runs, energy dissipating into nothingness. Maybe Oona wanted to be an actress for the same reasons Alice did: because other people told them they should be. It was one of the traditional possibilities for a pretty girl, everyone urging the pretty girl not to waste her prettiness, to put it to good use. As if prettiness was a natural resource, a responsibility you had to see all the way through.
fascinating. perhaps the only valid use of "prettiness", then, is to wield it as a weapon in order to attack the hierarchy itself